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Maxianne Berger

BOOKS

Melting, Melting

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Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, by Goran Simić, Biblioasis

by Maxianne Berger
16.05.2011

Memories of shoes and underwear pose as detached irony in the prose poem “What I Saw.” The first paragraph sets the tone. “On the streets of Sarajevo you could see so many shoes in pools of blood.” The poem’s focus then shifts to the insistence by “my mother” on the need for clean underwear. “What a shame for our family, she’d say. To be killed without dignity. God forbid!”

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BOOKS

An Auto-Erotic History in Poems

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An Auto-Erotic History of Swings, by Patricia Young, Sono Nis Press

by Maxianne Berger
14.02.2011

What Patricia Young found in Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was the wellspring for “The Art of Love,” a remarkable series of poems, each illuminated by an epigraph from Ellis’s writings. His “Most children … are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies” results in her “What [...]

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BOOKS

Art That Responds to the Anxiety of Living

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The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010, edited by Lorna Crozier, Tightrope Books

by Maxianne Berger
27.12.2010

Series editor Molly Peacock titles her prologue “Poetry is the art that responds to the anxiety of living…” This year’s guest editor Lorna Crozier reminds us that “Word by word a poem is built” and that “Poetry takes us back to the sensory quality of the words themselves.” There is a complementarity to these views [...]

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BOOKS

Bop-Inflected Vox, Meet Maple Leaf

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Maple Leaf Rag, poetry composed by Kaie Kellough, Arbeiter Ring Publishing

by Maxianne Berger
15.08.2010

How does a self-described “word-sound systemizer” convey the syncopations of his “bop inflected vox” onto a printed page? Montrealer Kaie Kellough’s second collection, true to its title Maple Leaf Rag after the Scott Joplin composition, does just that and then some. In his preface “readeradar,” Kellough explains that “it fuses jazz music with our national [...]

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BOOKS

Best Canadian Poetry: Formal Grace

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The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009, edited by A.F.Moritz, series editor Molly Peacock, Tightrope Books.

by Maxianne Berger
07.03.2010

Fifty-four periodicals submitted their 2008 issues to A.F. Moritz, editor of this second poetry anthology in the Best Canadian series. When Moritz was awarded the 2009 Griffin prize, the judges’ citation referred to “his formal grace”—an aesthetic which clearly underlies his choices. Of the magazines known for publishing edgier work, only PRECIPICe even makes the [...]

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BOOKS

“Morning Like a Licked-Clean Plate”

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True Concessions, Craig Poile, Goose Lane

by Maxianne Berger
07.12.2009

Earlier this year I’d come across Craig Poile’s poem, “The Blanket,” in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and liked it enough to mention it in my Rover review: “a love poem, with humour — “[b]ought from (and possibly made of) Canadian Tire[.]” This same strong poem serves as a fit finale to Poile’s [...]

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BOOKS

The Essential and the Best

The Essential P.K. Page The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008

by Maxianne Berger
26.01.2009

THE ESSENTIAL P.K. PAGE, a slimly winnowed collection of poems, is the second in a series aiming: …to provide the best possible introduction to a preeminent Canadian poet, by selecting key poems that carry the essence of an individual poetic voice and sensibility … Page has been part of Canada’s poetic landscape since emerging in the [...]

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